BROADCASTS.com

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I bear pain in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all day long? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? Consider and answer me, O Lord my God! Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death, and my enemy will say, \u201cI have prevailed\u201d; my foes will rejoice because I am shaken. But I trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord because he has dealt bountifully with me. (Psalm 13)

\xa0

There is a torrent of pain and suffering constantly battering our senses and burdening our hearts.\xa0 It\u2019s in our lives, it\u2019s in our world.\xa0 We can\u2019t engage meaningfully with every evil and ill we face though\u2014it would flood over us, overwhelming us again and again.\xa0 Often it does, in fact.

When city planners of the past decades would come across the not unrelated problem of unruly waters that would flow their banks every spring. They solved it by burying it.\xa0 That was the case for the Chedoke Creek that flows underground near (or under?) our church\u2019s property.\xa0 The landscape has been flattened and made useful, but no one sees or hears the waters of that creek anymore until they spill over the escarpment in the Chedoke waterfall, and then just as quickly as they appeared much of them are gone again into another culvert.\xa0

Slowly we come into awareness though, of the fact that we human folk are somehow healthier when graced by the sound, sight, and even touch of live, running water, no matter how unruly it may, at times, be.\xa0 And not only us, but the ecosystem is likewise healthier when creeks, streams, and swamps are left alone to clean the water and provide habitat for a myriad of other creatures of God\u2019s Creation.\xa0 Nothing lives or is brought life though when a creek is banished to a culvert and its once carved creek-bed is flattened to pavement.

So it is with our emotional world and our experience of grief and suffering.\xa0 Like so many practical man vs. nature solutions of the decades past, we\u2019ve often buried this river of hurt, painting on smiles if necessary.

But when we don\u2019t face the suffering we experience, it doesn\u2019t get the chance to drive us to the ultimate questions of life, death, and God that are important to ask.\xa0 Questions like, \u201cIs God really in control?\u201d \u201cIs He really present, or has He forgotten us?\u201d\xa0 To look at suffering in the light of the day is to grapple with the foundations of our faith and to cry out like David, \u201cHow long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?\u201d\xa0

If we don\u2019t confront suffering\u2014we implicitly deny the hope offered by Christ in the face of it.\xa0 On the other hand, if we accept suffering without question, we implicitly deny the unacceptable reality of the sin and evil in our world that Jesus came to save us from.\xa0 Both are ways of shunting our suffering underground.

So it\u2019s important to daylight the river of human suffering\u2014our suffering\u2014to look it in the face and turn it into prayer before God.\xa0 That\u2019s lament: prayers, questions, and cries that arise when deep suffering and deep faith meet, offered to the God whose love never fails.\xa0 \xa0

That is what David does in Psalm 13.\xa0 And it is only in this honest place of wrestling with both our sufferings and our faith that we discover the deep places where the salvation we have in Jesus really meets the deep pain, suffering, sin, and evil of our lives.\xa0 And that: being saved out of those places by the gracious action of God again and again\u2014that is what can make our hearts to sing.

\xa0